The notion of discernment is often used in our nation’s churches, but it is usually misunderstood. Cecil Day Lewis summarises it in his poem “Walking Away” as participating in:

… what God alone could perfectly show —
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

This is what this business of discernment is all about. To discern accurately is to fully accept divine love — to avoid clinging to false dreams and expectations, the belief that by working hard for fulfilment, one will make it in life and everything will turn out for good. It is a tricky concept to articulate and to get right. It encourages us to love by letting go.

If you are a young Christian in this country who takes the faith seriously, chances are at some stage you have entered a process called “discerning a vocation”. This process may be summarised as trying to figure out what one should do, in the words of poet Mary Oliver, with one’s “wild, precious life”, as if that permits a single, straightforward answer.

Anxiety masquerades as the need to discern the right path

In 2018, the Church of England launched “the Great Vocations Conversation” to challenge ministers to have one conversation a month that will help another person think about vocation. An Anglican cleric complained to me around this time, however, that discernment is an “unhelpful, churchy word”. By this, he meant that it divorces the Church from worldly realities, making processes around deciding what to do with life all about being inside the Church, on one’s knees, navel-gazing.

It is also, however, an unhelpful worldly word. It is a worldly word in what the Roman Catholic priest Henri Nouwen once described as a “wordy world”: one in which we are pummelled with words daily. We do not help one another to cultivate interior silence, where love is found.

Discernment, as it is deployed in churches, is worldly in so far as it bypasses that silence and creates another means by which anxiety about the future takes a strangle-hold of people’s lives. Questions arise. What do I need to do to inhabit that space in which I can be content with the world, at last?

We are told that we live in an “age of meritocracy”, and we should consider that it has seeped into the Church’s life. This is an age in which intelligence and individual merit matter above all else, creating what Michael Sandel calls “The Tyranny of Merit”. It is tyranny indeed because if we are free to go where our talents take us, the risk is that we blame ourselves when things go wrong, when aspirations are unrealised and we find that in fact we have no place to hide. That self-directed blame could all too easily be seen, by Christians, as a failure of discernment. Anxiety masquerades as the need to discern and follow through with the right path.

Anxiety needs to be eked out of the world; that is one summary of the Gospel message. That is accomplished in community: in love. To emphasise discernment to the individual is to risk enthroning oneself, when the reality is that the individual does not have to agonise over or even be aware of one’s vocation to become fully alive in God — far from it. Vocation entails service to a community that exists outside of ourselves. The message is “die to self”. Serve it.

To discover one’s purpose is not simply to find an answer to the question “What will I do with this life of mine?”, important though that question is. In fact, we all have the one vocation, which is to love God and one another. We should by extension recognize that discernment is about more than a single call, not imagining it as a one-off telephone conversation that we can hang up on. It is, to quote the Anglican priest R. M. Benson, about “the voice of God which called us at the first … calling us on … we must ever be listening”.

One’s specific vocation is not necessary to the divine economy

I can discern the need to help someone else today and forget myself, with ever increasing clarity in fact, if I jettison the tyrannous notion that finding the right course of action for my entire life is what matters most of all.

Leo Tolstoy tapped into this idea in War and Peace. His alter ego Pierre Bezukov experiences an epiphany and asks a question: “What comes next, then? What am I going to do?” His answer is instructive: “Nothing” but “live”! He gives it because “the one thing that had tormented him in earlier days, the constant search for a purpose in life, had ceased to exist”. Indeed, “it was the lack of any purpose that gave him the complete and joyous sense of freedom underlying his present happiness”.

Here Tolstoy sounds nihilistic, but he is not. Rather, his character Pierre reminds us that to pursue any given purpose to the exclusion of others is, tragically, to avoid falling in love with God; likewise, with one another. He reminds us that love is purposeful in and of itself. One’s specific vocation or purpose is not necessary to the divine economy in which all are invited to enter, and all that we do may be enveloped.

Fulton J. Sheen, the prominent Catholic leader, wrote of his own discernment of vocation to the priesthood in terms of Saint Peter’s call to be a disciple. Like Saint Peter on the Sea of Galilee, he wrote, we should forever “launch out into the deep” again: into that space in which we are lost in love and found.

If we do so and dispense with worries about our lives, so far as we can, we will enjoy what Sheen called a “long chain of generous beginnings” much like “rowing out again into the sea”.

To counter the tyranny of merit, England’s churches should be reminding us, please, that selfhood begins with a walking away. Love is proved in letting things go.